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Wednesday, July 12, 2006

China: Encouraging Retirement?

According to China Daily, the weekly magazine Liaowang (Lookout) recently carried an article in which some scholars suggested that China should alleviate its social welfare financial burden by making more people retire at an earlier age. "However, some experts objected to this suggestion. In their opinion, in order to reduce the pressure adding on China's welfare system, the most important task should be getting rid of all those abnormal 'early retirement policies'. In some specific areas, the work units could set a time range for retirement age so that people could arrange their life in a better way."

The article also notes that Secretary-general of the Social Policy Research Center from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and researcher from the Social Research Institute Tang Jun said that in China, aging problem is not as serious as in the West. Among other things, China has a large base number for labor resources--even in 2015-2020 when China's labor resources would reach its lowest point as some people predicted, there would still be 750 million working population available in China then.